{Pictured Rocks National Lake Shore originally posted by US Interior} After all of these posts, it shouldn’t surprise me that the National Park Service often doesn’t take Native history seriously, but researching for this post drove it home again. The website states, “From logging to the iron industry, shipping to shipwrecks, human history has played a large role at Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore” That is a pretty narrow view of human history - or maybe a narrow view of humanity. Regardless, Ojibwe and other Native history is completely erased.
What the Ojibwe called Pictured Rocks is unclear—I found everything from Nauitouchsinagoit to Minnising to Ishkweya`ii-aazhibikoon to Mazinaabikiniganan (the last I believe refers to pictographs) —I chose Gichigami which is the Ojibwe word for Lake Superior. Any Ojibwe language experts out there? What is clear is that this was an important place for the Ojibwe by at least the 16th and 17th centuries. People would leave tobacco offerings along the shore and it was sometimes used for burials.
The land was ceded in the 1836 Treaty of Washington with the Ojibwe and Odawa/Ottawa—a treaty that was so contentious, it led to civil war among the tribes involved. In response, Odawa leader Augustin Hamlin wrote this, ““It is a heart-rending thought to our simple feelings to think of leaving our native country forever, and which has been bought with the price of their native blood, and which has been thus safely transmitted to us. It is, we say, a heart-rending thought to us to think so; there are many local endearments which make the soul shrink with horror at the idea of rejecting our country forever—the mortal remains of our deceased parents, relations and friends, cry out to us as it were, for our compassion, our sympathy and our love.”
Despite this, Ojibwe people still live in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and Pictured Rocks is still a Native place. The least visitors can do is learn about its history.